Category Archive: POLITICS
The Tyranny of Guilt
"Cain after Having Killed His Brother Abel" by Henri Vidal (photo of statue in the Tuileries Gardens by Oswaldo Bautista)
(Tyrannie de la pénitence) (Written by Pascal Bruckner) (Translated to English by Steven Rendall) This mordant, elegant addendum to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is as unscientific and intuitive as that fraudulent work of pseudo-science. But Bruckner’s book is far more valuable, in that it spurns false jargon and history-moralizing, concentrating on simple empiricism, clothed in prose poetry. Why are the fashionable elites of European progression so full of hate and contempt, so bent-out-of-shape by confected targets whilst missing real threats waving weapons in their faces? They emblematize the classic joke-image of the liberal seeing the other guy’s point of view…
Continue Reading →Aren’t Those the Eagle’s Claws?
20 July, 1969: Apollo 11 Mission lands men on the Moon, in the Sea of Tranquillity. In these days of rapid technological advances and diminishing personal heroism, it is easy to forget how earth-shaking this achievement was. But anyone alive and out of nappies in July 1969 won’t forget. “From time immemorial men have gazed into the sky and pondered, theorised, even worshipped ‘the silver ornament of night‘”.* At Rice University in Houston, 12 September 1962, President John Kennedy said: “…the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and the planets beyond…We have vowed that we shall…
Continue Reading →Better Never Than Late
Joan gets the Call (by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879)
July 7, 1456: an ecclesiastic court of appeal acquits Joan of Arc of all and any ‘crimes’. Only hitch: she’d been burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. Some French folks maintain that Jeanne d’Arc was the last thing the English cooked properly. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Saint Joan (she was canonised in 1920), called her “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” In GBS’s play, the final scene has King Charles VII of France encounter Joan in a dream, circa her successful appeal. He tells her:…
Continue Reading →Unconventional
'Where are the cigars?' (George Healy's 'The Peacemakers')
July 6, 1854: The US Republican Party held its first Convention, in Jackson, Michigan, ‘under the oaks’. Six years later, the Grand Old Party had its first President: 162 years after that first Convention, the Republicans have taken a wild gamble with their nominee for President in 2017: Mr Trump, like Howard Beale in Network, is articulating the rage of the American people. It’s Big Casino – he could end up like Barry Goldwater, but if he moderates his approach, given the times, he might get there, like Nixon in 1968. Mind you, the Democrats aren’t exactly running FDR, or JFK. …
Continue Reading →Their Best Shot
Hamilton by John Trumbull, painted 2 years after the Duel
Alexander Hamilton Elie Wiesel Michael Cimino This 4th of July, we recall Alexander Hamilton, the multi-talented and widely reviled (vide Burr) political figure of the early days of the American Republic, who did as much as anyone to build the various struts of the enormous edifice now creaking and groaning under the weight of history, with Mrs Clinton or Mr Trump poised to kick away the last brace. What this founding father and first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury would have made of the modern opera now being staged in his name, one can only wonder. Al died in a…
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